“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The blueprints for “ideal” developments exist within the pool of genetic knowledge, providing the species with multitudinous avenues for fulfillment. Those blueprints exist mentally as ideals. They express themselves through the impulses and creativity of the species’ individual members.

Your natural athletes, for example, show through their physical expertise certain ideal body conditions. They may personify great agility or strength or power: individual attributes, physical ideals (pause) which are held up to others for their appreciation, and which signify, to whatever extent, abilities inherent in the species itself.

(Louder, when I asked Seth to repeat a phrase:) I believe that man runs the mile much quicker now (by about 12 seconds) than he did, say, thirty years ago. Has the body’s effective speed suddenly quickened? Hardly. Instead, mental beliefs about the body’s performance have changed, and increased physical speed resulted. The body can indeed run faster than the current record (of 3:49). I merely want to show the effect of beliefs upon physical performance. All people do not want to be expert runners, however. Their creativity and their ideals may lie in quite different fields of endeavor, but individual performance always adds to the knowledge of the species. Good, better, best. Is it bad to be a poor runner? Of course not, unless running is your own particular avocation. And if it is, you improve with practice.

Now your ideals, whatever they may be, initially emerge from your inner experience, and this applies to the species as a whole. Your ideas of society and cooperation arise from both a biological and spiritual knowledge given you at birth. Man recognized the importance of groups after observing the animals’ cooperation. Your civilizations are your splendid, creative, exterior renditions of the inner social groupings of the cells of the body, and the cooperative processes of nature that give you physical life. This does not mean that the intellect is any less, but that it uses its abilities to help you form physical civilizations that are the reflections of mental, spiritual, and biological inner civilizations. You learn from nature always, and you are a part of it always.

Examine the literature that you read, the television programs that you watch, and tell yourself to ignore those indications given of the body’s weaknesses. Tell yourself to ignore literature or programs that speak authoritatively about the species’ “killer instincts.” Make an effort to free your intellect of such hampering beliefs. Take a chance on your own abilities. If you learn to trust your basic integrity as a person, then you will be able to assess your abilities clearly, neither exaggerating them or underassessing them.

For a start you will acknowledge your existence in the framework of nature, and to do that you must recognize the vast cooperative processes that connect each species with each other one. If you truly use your prerogatives as an individual in your country, then you can exert far more power in normal daily living than you do now. Every time you affirm the rightness of your own existence, you help others. Your mental states are part of the planet’s psychic atmosphere.